On Windsong: Someone in a different thread was very adamant that the proc randomly chooses between the stats so that you aren't guaranteed to get mastery each time. I haven't ever verified that myself, but if true, then that would diminish the goodness of the enchant as 1/3 times you would get crit. Remember that haste is also nice for us now.

By DM, do you perhaps mean DR (Diminishing Returns)? I don't think DR makes the itemization worthless, but it is something you have to consider based on your gear.

Personally I go for the mini bubble, but that is without any math to back it up as being the best. I just prefer that style of enchant over the dodge.

Windsong is completely random 1/3 chance of getting mast, haste, or crit.I started out with colossus looking at my logs it never ended up as over heal, may of pushed some of the healers heals into over heal. I've gone windsong now I think it's slightly better than colossus but have no numbers to back that up.I don't think I'll be changing to river's song as I'm gearing towards haste and mastery both of which de-value avoidance, plus never have liked avoidance procs avoidance clickies are bad enough imo.

Daishan"I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it." -- Terry Pratchett

Enchant Weapon - River's Song \\ 1.6k dodge proc \\ I was never a fan on windwalk in cata, due to DM. Isn't the proc on a stat that suffers from DM wasted itemization?

I ended up not being a great fan of Windwalk myself in Cata as I felt that once hit CTC cap extra dodge was a waste, on the other hand, here we have no CTC cap in sight and found River's Song quite interesting, I just don't want to go for it yet as Windsong is the only one that gives a mix of offence and defence, so being that so far we've had issues with enrage timers and my deaths could have probably not been avoided by extra dodge as were mostly caused by issues in the learning process, I'd go for extra dps with a side of defence.

jere wrote:On Windsong: Someone in a different thread was very adamant that the proc randomly chooses between the stats so that you aren't guaranteed to get mastery each time. I haven't ever verified that myself, but if true, then that would diminish the goodness of the enchant as 1/3 times you would get crit. Remember that haste is also nice for us now.

I went with Windsong for now but I do like River's Song (if only for the name/coloring) and hope it may catch up in the long run, but Colossus may be the best of the three. Windsong is a 2/3 chance to get some useful stat (both haste and mastery are useful), so it is good for low content (heroics, etc) where your survivability isn't as much in question and you can worry more about DPS.

Just remembered about a 4th option for us the Living Steel Weapon Chain 200 exp, as 1/3rd of the Windsong procs are wasted for us I think 200 exp will average out to a similar value and no risk of it not been there when you really want it.

Edit: doing some rough (probably bad) napkin maths WS looks to have about a 10% up time on each of the procs 1500*(0.1+0.1)=300On average we look to get 300 of a useful stat from WS vs 200 exp all the time from the weapon chain.I think I'll stick with WS for now but the weapon chain looks like a good option if you dislike proc based enchants.

Daishan"I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it." -- Terry Pratchett

Am i the only one considering Dancing steel? 1650 strength for 12 seconds every minute? Thats roughly 1600 parry rating, plus more dps/healing and absorbs from sacred shield if refreshed during that window.

I'd take dancing steel over river's song, though don't forget on harder hitting bosses AP from strength is a relatively small contribution of our total AP.DS averages out to 320 strength I seem to remember on Theck's 100k veng graphs strength was worth half what exp was, so if you need the exp the weapon chain could be more dps if nothing else. DS will probably get you more dps in a 10 man with the lower veng.

Daishan"I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it." -- Terry Pratchett

daishan wrote:I'd take dancing steel over river's song, though don't forget on harder hitting bosses AP from strength is a relatively small contribution of our total AP.DS averages out to 320 strength I seem to remember on Theck's 100k veng graphs strength was worth half what exp was, so if you need the exp the weapon chain could be more dps if nothing else. DS will probably get you more dps in a 10 man with the lower veng.

When you calculate like this you should take into account that as you will be easily enchanting/ reforging at least to soft cap anyway, you rather have a choice between strength against the next best stat (e.g. haste) you would then forge into, making strength the winner in many cases. especially at lower vengeance

Is there any general consensus yet? Are there any big difference between the enchants that would really warrant the sole use of one of them.

I personally feel like none is really that important for us and im beginning to like the idea of Windsong better than Colossus/River Song/Dancing steel.

Colossus will give me 3 ppm of 1% or less of my HP(im already at almost 700k hp buffed). Riversong, is just avoidance and then Dancing steel which is like second best for me, at high levels of vengeance is just a tiny fraction of your dps and the avoidance you get is also negligeable.

Really depending on how the new RPPM works out Windsong could be really strong for us especially at higher gear levels. If your gearing strategy is Hit/Exp > Haste > Mastery or even Hit/Exp > Haste = Mastery then the increased procs will make it even better as we get more haste.

The extra absorbs from Collusus are nice and all but the amount of the absorb is going to quickly be worth less and less as bosses do more damage. I think Windsong is definitely worth considering since both the haste and mastery procs will increase damage reduction as damage taken increases.

the good thing about Winsdong is, that it is not ONE procc but three proccs that each proccs independently from each other. so you have the same ppm for mastery, haste and for crit.

also you can have several proccs at the same time. in example mastery and haste. or mastery and crit and so on. so yeah crit only helps a little bit on dps. but the other 2 are amazing for defense. Also as one procc doesn't lock the other, 2/3 is simply not true.

so for defense only the crit part does not interest us, which gives us still 4 very useful and a 5th and 6th very powerful state and only 2 aren't useful for defense but still one of those gives us some dps.

I don't know paladins, but I remember that some calculation about monks have shown that colossus is the best for brewmaster tanks. I'm currently going with colossus and am pretty content with it. Windsong is also a good choice. And one need to consider the expenses. River's song and dancing steel is way too expensive for only negligible, if any at all, improvement, so that's definitely meh. Currently Colossus and Windsong both sells around 100g on my server and actually can be crafted by my alt, while the other two requires reputation to learn the recipe.

Colossus is actually 8k bubble, not 7.5k, the tooltips dont match the proc (in game it will say 8000, check it).

I prefer Colossus myself, I know when it procs (which feels quite frequently) it is guaranteed mitigation against all types of damage, and helps prolong my SS absorbs a tiny amount. River's Song just is too much RNG for my taste. Windsong could be good, but I still prefer mitigation to Haste/Mastery/Crit (yuck). I dont even consider Dancing Steel, really expensive for limited survival gains (Im all about survival atm)

I keep meaning to try and do some rough maths on the enchants but I can't think of the way to go about it.As far as I know the colossus absorb doesn't scale with gear or dmg intake, where as the mast/haste from windsong will mitigate more dmg on a hard hitting boss than on a easy 5 man boss, same for the exp weapon chain. The avoidance from Dancing Steel should also avoid more dmg the harder hitting the boss is (avoiding the same amount of attacks just that they would of hit for more), but due to vengeance will offer a smaller % increase in our AP as we go into harder content. Sry rambling a little there, hope people understand what I'm trying to get at.

Daishan"I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it." -- Terry Pratchett

In 5.1, we’re migrating four additional procs over to the Real PPM system. Dancing Steel and Jade Spirit are 2 Real PPM, River's Song is 4 Real PPM, and Colossus is 6 Real PPM.

So this should allow to do some more solid calculations in terms of average value of the enchants. Colossus has a relatively small but reliable (compared to dodge chances) absorbtion that is avaliable roughly every 10 seconds, so something like 800DPS being subtracted. Rivers Songs dodge is available 2x more often then the others, and actually with a 7 second duration and 4PPM plus a bit of haste this can have like 50% uptime of 1650 dodge, so roughly 800 dodge (very roughly 1%) in average.

Dancing spirit seems to have only half the uptime (is it also a 7 second buff) of a similar amount of parry, plus some limited offense and sacred shield / WoG boost.

For the time being I will definitely stay with Colossus, but I can imagine that Rivers Song can have an advantage especially when the boss damage grows larger while the Colossus bubble stays constant.

daishan wrote:I keep meaning to try and do some rough maths on the enchants but I can't think of the way to go about it.As far as I know the colossus absorb doesn't scale with gear or dmg intake, where as the mast/haste from windsong will mitigate more dmg on a hard hitting boss than on a easy 5 man boss, same for the exp weapon chain. The avoidance from Dancing Steel should also avoid more dmg the harder hitting the boss is (avoiding the same amount of attacks just that they would of hit for more), but due to vengeance will offer a smaller % increase in our AP as we go into harder content. Sry rambling a little there, hope people understand what I'm trying to get at.

I understand exactly where you are going. this are exactly my arguments why I prefer Windsong...

Ok I'll have a random stab at some maths (this will be wrong probably very wrong )600 mast = 1% dmg reduction from SotRApproximately 50% uptime on SotR so 600 rating = 0.5% less physical dmg takenWindsong averages out to about 600 mast/haste/crit taking the crit out leaves us with 0.3333% dmg reduction from windsong.Colossus averages out to 800 dps absorbs.800/ .00333333= 240000 dpsIf i'm anything close to right it looks like we need to take 240kdps before windsong mitigates more dmg than colossus O.oAs I said most likely shit maths would love to know where i've gone wrong.

Daishan"I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it." -- Terry Pratchett

I'm not sure that's right. 240,000dps ? that's seems a very small (if you mean damage) or extremely high number depending on what you're applying it to, currently my fights are like 40k dps damage taken.

Colossus will be 800 HPS (it's an absorb not damage), over the course of a 5 minute fight it will absorb around 240,000 in damage.

The Windsong is going to harder to calculate, at least, it is for me.

I had it (song) on last night so my numbers will be a little screwy but using real numbers might be easier to figure this out although I could be totally wrong, I think it's closer to reals.

Stone Guard last night lasted 5:51, if I had used Colossus(5.1) it would have absorbed (800x351) 280,800 damage.

Windsong procs are supposedly independent, (mastery) proc'ed 6 times, for an uptime of 17.2%, additionally I only managed to keep SotR up 34% of the time during the fight (bad me ) so only half of all SotR's had an extra 1500rating or 2.5%, so that is 0.425% extra physical dmg reduction during the whole fight.

I took 9.4million in Rend damage and 4.8million in regular melee dmg (or 14,232,407 in total) so 0.425% of that is 60,488 (rounded up).

Lets take a longer more static fight, my longest of the night was Will of the Emperor.

It clocked in at 8minutes and 41 seconds, so Colossus would have absorbed (521x800) 416,800 in HPS.

Windsong, proc'd mastery only 5 times, an uptime of 11%, luckily my SotR was steady at 33%, now however only a 3rd of my SotR's are now granted that extra 2.5%, or 0.275% physical damage reduction. Will is all physical, I took 19,145,698. So that leaves us with windsong helping with 52,651 dmg. So I absorbed less damage with a longer time simply because I didn't get lucky with the procs.

Even taking the highest proc rate, which was haste, still takes us to a similar % as stone guard and 81,369dmg.

This is only in 5.1, from looking at peoples logs currently Colossus seems to absorb considerably less than is indicated by the 800HPS it will after the patch, currently it seems to only be around 25% of the totals it will be then. Also my numbers are reducing an already reduced number as I did have windsong on, however if my working out is anywhere near correct, it shouldn't be that big a shift.

Last edited by Lastwolf on Thu Nov 08, 2012 5:34 am, edited 1 time in total.

Ye i'm fairly sure i'm doing something wrong.What i'm trying to say in my last post is that we'd need to be taking on average 240k dmg ever second for windsong to mitigate more dmg then colossus bubbles absorb.If that's anything close to correct from a purely dmg prevention stand point windsong will be fairly weak until we get to bosses doing crazy high tank dmg.

Daishan"I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it." -- Terry Pratchett